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In the last year, after police dogs, horses, wolves and tigers, Charlotte Dumas has again turned to dogs as her photographic subjects. In September, a selection of her work will be shown at the Foam Museum of Photography in Amsterdam, including two recent series of street dogs in Palermo and dogs in animal shelters in New York.Since finishing school in 2000, Charlotte Dumas (b. 1977) has exclusively photographed animals. A portrait of an animal, in her opinion, best lends itself to reflection on emotions. The subject of her final exam project was aggression. She photographed people fighting, but she felt that this representation of aggression was too unequivocal, that it referred too directly to a human narrative. As a result, she came to photograph police dogs, biting aggressively into men in padded suits during training. Although these portraits guide viewers in a given direction, they allow more space for interpretation. From attacking police dogs, she moved on to police horses in action, to horses standing still, and then to wolves and tigers lying down. In just a few years, her work developed from photographs filled with brutality and action to calm, intimate portraits. The aggression is now only latently present, with the wolves and tigers that live in captivity. The photographs demonstrate the tragedy of the caged beast. But Dumas’s photographs of dogs and horses also evoke a somewhat sombre atmosphere, in the decidedly monumental, still and serene way they are depicted. The animal is on a pedestal, yet at the same time, dethroned. Diffuse light ensures an exceptionally melancholy atmosphere. Animals have always had a presence in art, from the 30,000-year-old cave paintings at Lascaux, to the 17th-century cows of Paulus Potter, and horses by Delacroix and Géricault, from the 19th century. Animals are pictured as mythological phenomena, as symbols for the virtues and vices, as hunting trophies. In contemporary art, interest in animals has been exceptionally great over the last few years, a development that runs parallel to the recent extensive debate about animal welfare taking place throughout our society. For the first time in history, there is a political party for animals. Mink farms and boxed calves are much-discussed topics in Parliamentary debates. Philosophers are concerning themselves with the ethical aspects of how we behave towards animals. Paul Cliteur, for example, believes that within half a century, people will look back in shame at our moral blind spot – our cruel treatment of animals in the bio-industry. Last May, Erno Eske’s book, Democratie voor dieren (Democracy for animals), even made it onto the Netherlands’ NOS national television news. Important reasons behind the increased social concern for animals include increasing scientific insight that, biologically, people are closely related to animals, and the awareness of the unscrupulous ways in which we use animals for our own profit. In art, the animal debate has been cranked up in more ambiguous and sometimes radical ways. In a Danish museum, Marco Evaristti exhibited goldfish in a blender. Visitors were given the opportunity to turn the creatures into mush. The Costa Rican artist, Guillermo Vargas, allowed a dog to starve in a museum. In our own country, Tinkebell created a commotion by strangling her own pet cat and making a handbag out of it. These artists push ethical and legal limits in order to point out the double standards that the West adheres to in our dealings with animals. Without a hint of a guilty conscience, millions of cows and pigs are slaughtered without ever having seen the light of day, while we pamper our pets as if they were our children and are horribly offended when a sparrow is killed on Domino Day. As soon as the creature is given a face, we lose our stomachs. Charlotte Dumas also introduces this political and social discourse, albeit more subtly. She photographs only animals that man has put into distressing circumstances, wild animals living in captivity, or dogs that have been cast aside and left to wander the streets. She is currently working on a series about another situation in the animal rights debate. This time, they are circus animals. Just the glimpse that Dumas offers of the animals’ living conditions is often enough to give an idea of the not-so-salubrious conditions in which they are kept. Of all Dumas’ animals, the dogs are the most touching, probably because they are closest to us and, sleeping in a box in the street, for example, they are so clearly being left to their fate. Even the tigers and wolves, despite their proverbial cleverness, are surprisingly enough very cuddly. Here, the beauty of the image prevails, thanks to the balanced composition, the fall of light, the fur that almost begs to be stroked. It is not Dumas’s intention to shock people, nor to impose her personal vision. Everything revolves around the emotions evoked by the animals themselves. Dumas believes that beautiful pictures are better able to create awareness than photographs of obvious suffering. More than an aggressive new impulse to the debate, her art brings charm and considered contemplation.It sometimes seems as though the animals have been asked to pose, so perfect is their demeanour. The horses in particular are ideal models, tragic, yet at the same time proud, high-spirited. This is part of Dumas’ working method. She takes her time, with the result that the animals are very aware of the photographer’s presence. According to Dumas, the animals observe her just as much as she observes them, and this can be seen in their gesture or expression. She uses a standard lens, so that the distance that the viewer experiences is the actual distance between the photographer and the animal. The palpable presence of people gives the photographs an extra dimension. We come so close to the animal that we see it as an individual, with recognizable emotions and characteristics.It is to this extreme humanizing of these animals that Dumas’ work owes its identity and meaning. At the same time, it is a sign of the complete derailment of Western society’s relationship to animals. It is perhaps not her intention, but with her humane animal portraits, Dumas reaffirms the continued estrangement from nature on the part of the West. She unintentionally allows us to see how little the Western individual is still capable of allowing an animal to be an animal. Manon Braat is an art historican and freelance publicist.Work by Charlotte Dumas can be seen at: Dutch Seen: New York Rediscovered, Museum of the City of New York, 10 June-13 September 2009.Paradis (solo exhibition), Foam Museum of Photography, Amsterdam, 4 September 2009-11 November 2009.Made in Arnhem: Invites, Museum of Modern Art, Arnhem, 11 September-13 November, 2009.